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Retail Top 100 2012, No. 42: Target

September 26, 2012

After spending two years preparing to take control of its website from Amazon.com, a prominent link ("learn all about what's new") on Target's home page failed to work when the site went live in August. That was just the beginning. Three weeks later, the release of a collection from Italian fashion house Missoni brought a rush of visitors that crashed the site for most of the day. A month later, the site went down again during peak shopping hours. Later that day, Target announced in a one-sentence statement that Target.com president Steve Eastman had left the company to "pursue other opportunities." All told, Target.com crashes accounted for more than half of the major outages on the top 100 sites in the U.S. by revenue, according to Web monitor AlertBot. Still, e-commerce analyst Colin Sebastian at Robert W. Baird & Co contends that Target made the right move. "The complexity of building a large-scale e-commerce site is really difficult," he said. "But, at the end of the day, Target made the right decision. Amazon is a competitor, and you don't want them controlling your e-commerce business."

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